After a woman's death from butt implant surgery gone awry, public attention has turned on the drive for a bigger butt, and the extreme measures (illegal injections, chicken-fattening pills) women use to get it.

Said pills, allegedly made of hormones used to plump up chickens, got their moment in the Sun this weekend. Sold under names like Star Curves, Big Beautiful Butt Formula, and Brand New Booty, they claim to be herbal versions of the chicken-chunking compounds, but since they're unregulated, they could contain all manner of poison. Basically, don't take them.

Also, don't fly to a foreign country to get someone who is not a medical professional to inject silicone into your ass. That's what the British aspiring glamour model Claudia Aderotimidid last week, and she ended up dying after silicone made its way into her bloodstream and clotted in her lung. Now her injector, a singer who goes by Black Madam, Padge Windslowe, and other names, is wanted by police, and could be charged with murder. Yeah, don't illegally inject stuff into someone's butt either.

Some of this stuff seems funny (injection; butt), but really, butt enhancement is no weirder than breast implants. And taking chicken poison to plump up your ass is no stranger than shooting botulism into your wrinkles. As Lori Adelman points out at The Grio, all this isn't just about vanity — it's also about money:

While it's easy and perhaps tempting to snicker at the lengths to which fame-hungry young women will go to see their dreams realized, less laughable are the multi-million dollar media empires that have been built by women like Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian, Nicki Minaj, Lil' Kim and Coco, all of whom boast ripe "assets" — on their backs and in the bank.

Punny wording aside, it's true that the avenues of fame and fortune for women — especially women of color — are still pretty narrow. Whether a bigger butt would really have given Claudia Aderotimi a better shot is anyone's guess, but she was right about one thing: a woman's success still has a lot to do with how she looks. And while a big butt isn't worth dying for, the calculation Aderotimi likely made — risk of silicone in your lung versus shot at the big time — makes a disturbing amount of sense. Let's hope we soon get to a place where it doesn't. in